Swanlights

On possibly his most demanding record to date, Antony Hegarty displays a half-dozen stylistic shifts, duets with Björk, and teams with Nico Muhly.

Antony Hegarty ended Thank You for Your Love, the EP that preceded his fourth LP, Swanlights, with a pair of covers-- "Pressing On" by Bob Dylan, and "Imagine" by John Lennon. Written during Dylan's punchline-prone Christian era, "Pressing On" is notable for its cutting, lucid assessment of the human condition in the second verse: "Temptation's not an easy thing/ Adam given the devil reign/ Because he sinned I got no choice/ It run in my vein." Antony handles those words with weepy verve, as though the realization of his doom is as strangely liberating as it is terrifying. During "Imagine", he trades Lennon's imperative edicts for a personal past tense: "Imagine there's no Heaven/ It was easy when I tried," he sings, recasting that famed gambit. By the time the song, which closes the EP, sublimates into a noisy infinity, you've realized the extent of Antony's despair: He's imagined our way out of hate and self-destruction, but our own myths and hang-ups might finally hang us all. Our beliefs won't save us; rather, they might end us. On Swanlights, his most diverse and possibly most demanding album to date, we listen as Antony searches for some sort of reset button, in spite of our proclivities.

Swanlights is neither Antony's most immediate nor best album. It lacks its singular masterpiece, its "Cripple and the Starfish", "Hope There's Someone", or "Aeon". What's more, the album's half-dozen stylistic shifts show that, maybe for the first time, one of music's most assured stylists might be a bit unsettled. From romping single "Thank You for Your Love" to the tortured "The Spirit Was Gone", from the whirlwind "Salt Silver Oxygen" to the fastidiously restrained "The Great White Ocean", Swanlights is willfully uneven. "Flétta", Antony's much-buzzed duet with Björk, is indeed a mesmerizing composition, with fits and starts that coil suddenly into crescendo. It's a late-album distraction, too, a concession to an idol that would've fit better as a B-side. As quickly as Swanlights can attract its audience, it can also repel. Across three records and a few dozen collaborations, Antony's seemed an uncanny puppet master of grace; Swanlights, however, wobbles.

Despite those shortcomings, Swanlights might be Antony's richest album yet, with musical and thematic charms that take their time to take their hold. It's a brilliantly composed and played record, with the Johnsons responding exquisitely to Antony's production and the arrangements of young talents like Nico Muhly and Maxim Moston. During "I'm in Love", Antony whirls above calliope organ and Greg Cohen's aggressive upright bass, the drums adding a broken trot that suggests extreme heart flutter. On "Swanlights", he warps his voice through backmasking and distortion, highlighting the torture of the subject-- Swanlights is the name of a polar bear once killed for dog food, as pictured on the album's cover-- by singing against and around himself. Antony continues to link himself with what he sees as a dying natural world, the martyr tying himself to the stake he claims the most. The love and sadness of which he sings, then, are more meaningful than they might first appear; as on last year's The Crying Light, Antony's talking about the end of everything, not just himself.

A limited edition of Swanlights comes bound by 144 pages of Antony's paintings, sketches, scribbles, and collages. In the artist's statement that closes the book, Antony writes, "I don't want your future. I hope when I die, that I never return to your world. I will go where the trees go.... Gut me with sticks and stuff my body full of lavender crystals." Nearly all of Swanlights' tracks play heavily on some sort of end-- death in two of the first five songs, spiritual or physical molting in two of the first seven, sleep to dream in the title track, the way that mid-album instrumental lingers, unresolved. But none of these ends are ultimate. Antony's death in "The Great White Ocean" grants him eternity with his family and the earth, while the exit in "Ghost" frees snakes and specters from their hosts. Ends are means to beginnings. The visual art reflects a quest for similar renewal. A blot of wonderful, vibrant pink, for instance, explodes from a dull, morose block of black, and a penciled supercontinent politely imposes itself atop a photo of seemingly endless ocean. A time-damaged newsprint photo of Kurt Cobain gets new color, courtesy of Antony's pen.

That last picture is telling: Four albums into a fascinating if not flawless career, Antony Hegarty remains one of music's great absorbers of darkness, be that the AIDS crisis he discovered upon moving to New York in the early 90s or the worldwide environmental crisis on which his albums have increasingly focused. But he's not interested in offering tales of woe without redemption, and that's never been more apparent than on Swanlights. During "Salt Silver Oxygen", he casts God as the woman and hero above a brilliant musical whirlwind. If that's the save, closer "Christina's Farm" is the dawn: "I awoke to find/ A whiteness inside/ Everything did shine/ Slyly from each body... My face and your face/ Tenderly renewed," he offers faintly, bravely, and assuredly. Even here, on the stumbling block of Swanlights, Antony's message remains one of faithful renewal, despite its requiring changing everything we know-- or, hell, dying-- in the process.